![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/gillan7.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/gillan.jpg)
Fox locked up in a hen-house
Tony Iommi was interviewed recently by Eddie Trunk. The interview appeared in his Sirius XM show and later was posted as a podcast. Amid promoting Iommi’s latest venture (which is a fragrance of all things), the conversation turned onto Born Again.
‘Born Again,’ we talked about in the past, you always said you wanted to remix that record. That’s the Sabbath record with Ian Gillan. I remember in the past you told me that you couldn’t find the tapes. Have you had any luck finding the masters on that?
Well, apparently, Ralph [Baker, Tony’s manager] found a connection there, where they were. I haven’t heard anymore, they discovered where they were in some library in some record company somewhere.
So, obviously, I’d love to do that, I’d love to get that one sounding right because I think that was a really good album, and when we first had done it in the studio, it sounded great.
But when it came out on the record, it was really muffled and not good, so I wanted to do something with that.
I had dinner with Ian Gillan, he told me that he was so drunk that he didn’t realize that he told you he would join Black Sabbath the night you recruited him
Oh man, I’ll tell you what, he’d just come in from Kuala Lumpur, believe it or not, he traveled in from Kuala Lumpur, and we met him in Woodstock in Oxfordshire at a pub, which probably wasn’t a good move.
He turned up about 11 o’clock in the morning, Geezer and I were there, and he said ‘I’ve just come from Kuala Lumpur.’ We must’ve had a drink, and another drink, and another drink.
Anyway, the pub was closing, and they just locked us in and left us there, and god, the state of us at the end of the day, and he don’t even remember, and of course, his manager said, ‘Ian, if you’re going to make any important decisions, can you let me know?’
Ian went ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Agreeing to join Black Sabbath…’ It was really funny, actually. We got endless stories with him, we’ve had some bloody fun on that tour.
The album with Glenn [Hughes] too, [1986’s] ‘Seventh Star,’ that’s a fantastic record too. I just saw Glenn last week, we were on the funeral service for Frankie of Quiet Riot. Glenn was there, I thought of the time I sat with you and Glenn and Geezer at Ronnie’s. It’s remarkable how great Glenn still looks and sounds, so you could easily do a reunion show with that particular record
He’s one of the few people that can, I mean, the way he can sing, it’s just unbelievable. Funny enough, don’t know if you know Jimmy, his manager, long hair, big beard, anyway, he’s playing bass on this song.
Listen to the whole thing (Iommi’s interview starts at around 3’30” into the podcast and Born Again related bits start at around 28’40”):
The track mentioned above is an instrumental called Scent of Dark recorded apparently to promote the fragrance. And that’s Glenn’s manager Jimmy Crutchley on the bass:
Thanks to Ultimate Guitar for the heads up and the quotes.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Funny enough, Iommi is waiting for this master tapes since more than 8 months now. It seems we will get nothing in the end
December 23rd, 2021 at 04:31It usually does come down to a contract or such as to who ‘owns’ what in the end. All the legal trash that goes on in the game, that has lead to many artists having no rights or limited rights to certain aspects of their own recordings. Who does own the recordings of Born Again? The whole Born Again situation sounds like chaos right from the start of that doomed lineup, substance abuse eh? It is not surprising in many ways. Cheers.
December 24th, 2021 at 21:01